To get to the most interesting place in the solar system we’ve got to crack a hard shell

Jupiter is way outside the Goldilocks zone where water can exist on the surface of a planet in a liquid form — seemingly a requirement for life as we know it. After all, everywhere we look on Earth where there’s water, from the Arctic Ocean to the Dead Sea, we find life.

So if water freezes over that far out in the solar system why should we think there might be life on Jupiter?

We shouldn’t. But on the moons, life there just might be. Particularly on Europa, a world made mostly of water.

There’s more water on Europa than Earth. (NASA/Kevin Hand)

It’s true that Europa has an icy shell perhaps a couple of miles thick, but most of its 60-mile-deep oceans are made of liquid water. That’s because the gravity of Jupiter and other nearby moons flex the cores of Europa. It’s a bit like a rubber ball that heats up when you squeeze it rapidly in your hand. How cool is that?

So there’s a source of energy, and there’s water. Might there be life?

Well, I’d love to know. It’s not too expensive to send a probe to orbit Europa, and fly-by missions are even cheaper. What would be technically challenging, however, is breaking the ice. And to find evidence of life we probably need to crack the ice.

How might we do that?

In a recent podcast astrophysicist and scientific communicator extraordinaire Neil deGrasse Tyson suggested dropping a radioactive ball that would heat the ice, melt it, and slowly burn through the ice until reaching the ocean. But as he notes, that kinda sort of would violate the prime directive. And how would we feel if an alien species started dropping radioactive probes onto Earth?

BBC News recently reported on a steel probe, dubbed “The Penetrator,” that hit a block of ice at a speed of 750 mph and decelerated at a rate of 24,000 g’s. This could deliver instruments into the ice, but would perhaps penetrate only a few meters, far short of breaking through the miles-thick ice sheet.

A conventional drill would work. Earth-bound oil companies have proven that it’s no sweat to drill into a few miles of rock, and pure ice should be quite a bit easier to drill into. But the expense of getting all that equipment to the surface of Europa would be, umm, astronomical.

Here’s a look at the British Penetrator in action, smashing into a block of ice. It’s pretty cool.

The bottom line: Europa and some of Jupiter’s other moons seem like the most logical places for life to exist in our solar system aside from Earth. If we’re going to probe them sufficiently during my lifetime we need to get creative.